Various robotised installations have recently been proposed for automatically laying a refractory lining on the inner wall of a metallurgical converter. Of these robotised installations, a distinction can be made essentially between two categories, namely those in which the depalletisation of the bricks is carried out inside the converter as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,720,226, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference and those in which depalletisation is carried out outside the converter as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,765,789, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. Each of these categories of installation has its own advantages and disadvantages. Thus, for example, the advantage of the installations with depalletisation inside the enclosure is relatively rapid execution, since apart from the relatively short idle times necessary for changing the pallets, the two types of brick required are permanently available on the work platform.
The advantage of the installations with depalletisation on the outside is a reduction in the congestion on the platform, thus contributing to greater safety of the supervisory personnel located on the latter and/or making it possible to reduce the surface area of the platform, so that the installation can be used for repairing both large converters and converters of smaller size, and so that the bricklaying can also be carried out in the upper part of a converter where the diameter decreases progressively. Unfortunately, the installations with depalletisation on the outside require sophisticated hoists and complex procedures in order selectively to bring the two types of brick onto the platform at the workrate of the robot laying them.
The document U.S. Pat. No. 4,786,227, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference relates to an installation with a reduced congestion of the work platform as a result of the use of a robot which no longer executes sweeps above the surface of the platform and which consequently makes it accessible to the personnel in complete safety.